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Smedly Butler!


Inspire!

I transitioned into a tech lead a year ago and at first it was kind of annoyed by all the requests from the team regarding technical assistance.

I realized there were two paths I could take. 1. Continue to be annoyed and try to get as much coding in as I can. 2. Sit down with each individual, help them, give examples of how things should work etc.

Luckily I chose the latter option and I have a great relationship with all the team, I have strong coders that are more self-sufficient, and I enjoy more time coding now.

I think the lesson I learned is that you get out of your team much more than you put in, strive to inspire your devs.


Agreed. I think one of the things I learned from my Tech Lead is how to handle stressful code-related situations and communicate with other teams.

This is one of the important skills to have and will have huge impact on "engineering atmosphere".


"And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans" - Great line...

Good luck BradFitz!


Adheres to Tethics.


And it's only $975!


Oh No! That is an unfortunate link from Amazon where somebody is trying to hustle money. You don't need the 2nd edition since there is no change from the 1st which you can get for $10+ from many sites.

The book is quite good. It is written like a "Manga" book and hence has tons of drawings to help develop intuition for the concepts. It is written by a group of ordinary people with help from Scientists (a quirky club named Transnational College of Lex from Japan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippo_Family_Club ) and thus is very accessible. Highly recommended for High school students and above.

Note that the same group has also published two other books in the same vein; a) What is Quantum Mechanics b) What is DNA; both of which are also highly recommended.


Wait, MySpace is dead?!?


What about Canadian? ;)


Wow, I originally clicked on the article thinking it was tongue-in-cheek, but it's fantastic! Glad to see that someone is taking time to help others (like me)


Same here. It's actually a really good post!

Regarding his comment about hearing from amateurs who think they've solved the world, that is something I've heard from a lot of physics professors, that they get a lot of emails with crazy stuff like this: http://i.imgur.com/QTt6ZTq.gif

Why does that happen in physics and not chemistry, bio, econ, comsci or any other subject?


It happens in math and theoretical CS all the time. Proofs of P != NP (or the opposite!) are particularly popular.

In applied CS, instead of emailing professors people just post their stuff on the internet. Sometimes it gets wildly popular. How do you think PHP came around?


Everyone's an armchair economist so I wouldn't count econ out.

I think that math/physics are more accessible to the layman. I know where to go if I want to get deeper into this subject.

I really don't know how to start becoming an amateur chemist or biologist. I've wanted to learn more about synthetic biology and gene therapy, but it's not as simple as cracking open a math book or going to a dev bootcamp. I wish these resources existed though! My best guess is because exploring chem and bio have bigger resource requirements like lab space.


I think math/physics are less accessible to the layperson, but more subject to Dunning-Kruger. There are so many popular accounts of quantum this and string that in the media that a lot of the population seems to feel qualified to hold an opinion on anything quantum-y. ("It's on TV" => "I'm encouraged to have an opinion about it.")

In reality it's literally impossible for most people to imagine how hard the math is - because an undergrad physics or engineering degree is barely even a warm-up for it.

I'd love to see a TV show that made it clear just how challenging the math is without reducing it to the usual storytelling.

Popularisation can be great, but maybe it would be good to get a realistic appreciation for the raw version into the public narrative.


Biology, and I Assume chemistry as well, are in practice all about lore; the peculiarities of particular entities are where the action is & theory is a relatively small thing that falls out of that. So not only do you need a lab to do experiments, you need to be hanging around a lab to pick up all this disjointed lore.


Oh it happens all the time in econ - although one could argue that economics at the moment does deserve some of it. You regularly get emails and even the occasional book, linking to yet another youtube misconception of how money, banking and the economy work. I usually reply pointing out the time at which the first provable mistake is made, and I've yet to get over 5 minutes. They do get extra points for being vaguely anti-semitic before that point.


As a former professor it does happen in biology. Whenever some crazy person would ring the switchboard in the biology area they would pass it on to me - I am not sure why, maybe it was because I was relatively patient with the people who called. Lots of interesting conversation, but little science.


What about ease of setup? I'd take the NoSql setup any day. If in need of a super light, super quick db that is for a "non-enterprise" application, it's tough to beat NoSql...


Which NoSQL are you referring too? Most are not that easy to implement (saying that while managing a few PBs of data in production with a few such tools)


What? I thought ease of setup was a winning point of mysql?


Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer


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